I have been told that I must deal with a “misogynistic” statement expressed on Freethoughtblogs by Lux Pickel. They said, “Centering our pro-abortion rhetoric around women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of trans individuals.“
I have two points to make here.
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There is a gross misunderstanding about what I can do. I do not manage FtB in any sense of the word — this is a kind of anarchic collective with a group of fully autonomous blogs. I have no particular authority. In fact, I’d say I have less authority, because there’s definitely an anti-authoritarian mindset here, and the fact that so many people think that because of my traffic (which is totally irrelevant to status at FtB) I must be the boss has fostered a bit of a counter-reaction. So the last thing that would get a proposal approved is having me author it.
This is not to say this is a good situation. The lack of central authority here has, in my opinion, been a detriment to the progress of the network. If I had to do it all over again, I would have set up a board of directors with some limited authority, and which would have included independent non-bloggers, to make essential decisions about the overall direction of the network. But we didn’t, and I am not in charge of the network. That seems very hard for a lot of people to grasp, that we might have devolved power here to the group rather than keeping it all in the hands of the founders.
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Even if I were the Omnipotent Tyrannical Overlord of FtB, though, I wouldn’t do anything about Lux’s post. I agree with them.
Here’s the problem. Gynecological services, including abortion, ought to be essential rights for all people who have female plumbing — ovaries, uteruses, all the tissues that developed under the influence of low levels of testosterone in the embryo. This is not synonymous with the psychological and sociological concept of “woman”. There are people who identify as men who have the capacity to get pregnant; there are people who identify as women who cannot get pregnant, and will never need an abortion. The naive expectation that the organization of some ducts in the nether region will always coordinate perfectly with the arrangement of neurons and synapses in the cranial region is mistaken. We are making a gross category error when we try to force all aspects of personhood to fit precisely into a simplistic conformist gender binary.
This can also work the other way: there are people who identify as women who will face medical issues like erectile dysfunction and prostate disease. That should be respected and treated as a matter of course, not as some weird peculiarity that is the subject of debates about what kind of doctor they should see.
And no, I’m not really interested in debating the ontological status of individuals with or without ovaries, or with or without testes. You’ll have to argue with the entire network, not just me, if you expect to get some kind of change in policy on it. Good luck with that!
I think there’s maybe a third point you should mention. Having just read your post, my initial impression was that trans activists were derailing the abortion debate to make it all about themselves. But reading Lux’s actual post, it’s clear the issue is actually cis-women (and one in particular) refusing to let the discussion even acknowledge anyone *but* themselves.
Goddamn TERFs. Bigots gotta bigot, I guess.
Okay, I do not, in any way, understand how this is being interpreted as misogynistic. The inclusion of trans persons in medical and bodily autonomy issues is not misogynistic, nor is it, in any way, erasing women. It also doesn’t take away from this being a feminist issue. I do not understand why some people are so fucking adamant about shoving all trans people out the door and slamming it in their faces. It’s not only an absurd sticking point, it’s a dehumanizing one as well. Bodily autonomy is much too crucial of an issue for anyone to get into a pissing match over bad words and concepts (woman / feminine man / masculine). This reminds me of how much I always have to mention, repeatedly, and emphasise in any thread dealing with sexual assault and rape, that this does not just happen to women. These issues affect us all, humans, people. That’s all anyone should concern themselves with, and get back into the fray and keep fighting to keep our rights from being eroded or taken away completely.
One thing I’ve loved about Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the casual mention here and there that this boy doesn’t have a penis, or that woman does have a penis, and so on, but this is accepted absolutely, and people are treated as the person they present as – I wish more people could cope with the simplicity of acceptance.
Yeah, because correctly identifxing that there are men and non-binary people needing reproductive services commonly associated with “women” apparently is a form of “what about the menz”.
It completely misses the power gradients between cis-people and trans people and the outright hostility trans people often receive from health care providers.
Nothing says “feminism” like taking the patriarchal definition of “baby making facilities = woman” and running with it. Thanks but no thanks.
HJ Hornbeck @ 2:
I think it’s a mistake to handwave this as, “eh, TERFs’. I think there are a lot of people (too many) who are uncomfortable with trans issues, not overly knowledgeable, who feel that feminism is somehow being co-opted, and it won’t be about women anymore. I’ve been an active feminist for over 40 years, and from where I stand, feminism has grown and changed over the years to encompass many intersectional issues. I don’t think feminism reaches far enough, and I don’t think it has grown enough yet. That’s where there’s a big arse fault line, I think. There are lots of old school feminists who, like most people as they get on a bit, not overly crazy about change, especially big change. In younger feminists, I think there is a lot of bigotry operating, and a lot of fear. Lots and lots and lots and lots of tribalism, people hanging onto their feminism, and no, they do not want it to fucking change.
When you dismiss all those people as TERFs, you end up ignoring the group of elephants standing in the middle of the room. A lot of people opposed to trans inclusion in autonomy issues are not radical feminists, and they don’t consider themselves to be trans exclusionary (I know, I know), so if you want to actually get through to anyone, dismissal isn’t the way, and I’m beginning to see “Oh, TERFs” and variations thereof as a form of othering.
Giliell @ 4:
No shit. Quoted for Silver-plated Truth.
Caine @5:
I’m half agreed. If the complainer is who I think it is, “TERF” is an accurate descriptor. If they’re not, the invocation of “misogynistic” suggests they have some knowledge of feminism or identify as such, and “TERF” is still accurate. As for dismissal, it’s the appropriate response when we’ve been there, argued that, and the consensus is inclusion. I’m no more interested in “getting through” to TERFs than I am to homophobes.
But otherwise, I agree that most trans* phobes are not TERFs, and dismissal will not get through to anyone.
Giliell @ 4:
I have to quibble a bit because it seems as though there’s a bit of equivocation here. The phrase “baby-making facilities = woman” could mean “the presence of baby-making facilities is the sole defining trait that makes a person a woman” in the hypothetical future where gender has been abolished. However, in the context of patriarchy, the statement would unpack to: “The presence of baby-making facilities makes a person a woman, which necessarily implies that they belong to the female gender, which, among other things, means that they have no function or value aside from their baby-making facilities and the usage thereof.”
Personally, I think that feminism and LGBT rights (emphasizing, rather than excluding the T) will all be served best by minimizing and ultimately abolishing the concept of gender entirely, which means that we should advocate the definition I provided for “baby-making facilities = woman” (or rather, “if woman, then baby-making facilities and not necessarily anything else“).
HJ @ 7:
Yeah, there’s that. I agree.
Jake @ 8:
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/12/29/mgtow-launches-one-man-war-on-hoo-has-and-the-human-beings-attached-to-them/
Jake Harban
No, fucking, no.
There is no inherent link between “baby making facilities” and “woman” any more than there is between “wearing skirts” and “woman”. There are obviously women who do NOT have “baby making facilities” and not all people with that plumbing are women.
Will gender survive equality? I have no idea. It’s possible, but not necessary. But I cannot make any predictions because none of us can imagine how it would be to live in a world where we would no be stereotyped from the moment the ultrasound displays one set of genitals or the other.
In the meantime IMO feminism is best served by treating body parts as body parts and not indicators of sex or gender.
I have to say though, I shared this issue with my trans husband (FtM, so literally the kind of person this issue is about) and he feels that being overly pedantic in language derails the abortion debate from what it’s actually about, which is the control of women. It’s good to acknowledge that trans people exist, but that’s certainly not something the pro-lifers acknowledge.
It’s a bit like how words like “faggot” and “dyke” are certainly used against straight people, but they’re not the primary victims.
Zibble @ 12:
The abortion ‘debate’ is about the control of PEOPLE. Why is that such a monstrous effing change to some folks? How does that derail the bodily autonomy rights discussion? This makes me angry on more than one level – here you are, bringing up your husband as some sort of proof that the “oh, hey, be nice to trans people, but don’t derail” crap has some sort of validity, when it doesn’t.
Every single time someone insists that this can be a woman only issue, it makes me feel like “yep, women got dropped back into their own sub-human pool again”, especially when the argument against the use of people is so ferocious – are women not people? In my eyes, this resistance to using people is degrading to everyone.
zibble
Are trans people to cis women as straight people are to gay people?
Is there any meaningful difference between a “women’s issue”, a “women-centric issue” and a “women only issue?’ Because I value the class based analysis that sees restrictions on abortion rights as part of the societal oppression of women, but I don’t want to erase the experience of trans* individuals.
Caine:
I think there are a lot of people (too many) who are uncomfortable with trans issues, not overly knowledgeable, who feel that feminism is somehow being co-opted, and it won’t be about women anymore.
There are also some of us who are completely ignorant and rely on lively discussion in forums such as FTB to educate ourselves and figure out what we think. While it may seem like oft-trodden ground to you, I appreciate the effort and I suspect others do as well. It’s how we reduce our overall level of ignorance.
Qwints:
Yes, I think there is meaningful difference there. I don’t know how trans persons in general would feel about woman-centric, though. Personally, I think I’ve long been ready to stop being branded as woman, in favour of simply being a person. I do realize that this is no easy matter in our various societies. Wishful thinking, I guess.
And, less angrily to Zibble, way back when I went to have an abortion, if I walked through the door along with a person who read as a man, about as far along in pregnancy as I was, and who also there to have an abortion, what difference would there have been between us? We would both be people looking to have a specific medical procedure done.
@Caine, thanks.
In a sense, I’ve always found that using the word ‘people’ to reference women as a group (even if it is majoritarily women) to be rather subversive in and of itself, and I don’t see how that diminishes women in any way. Because as you say, Caine, women are people – kind of a revolutionary thought, considering history.
And the word ‘people’ simply has the added advantage of including those who do not identify as women but who are also affected by the issue (in this case, abortion). Win-win, in my opinion.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s like when it’s a book about women, it’s suddenly “women’s lit” as opposed to just literature, which is what it’s called when it’s a book about a man. Or a movie. Or a political issue. It’s a way of detracting from the seriousness/validity of the topic of discussion, and making a distinction between “real” [whatever] and women’s [whatever]; a distinction that is completely bogus.
So yes. I am also ready to be referred to as a person, rather than primarily, firstly and always most importantly, a woman.
Ok, I’m all kinds of confused here. By what logic does it make sense to claim that recognition of trans and non-binary people who can get pregnant is misogynistic? Was this someone who reads “trans” and suddenly starts screaming about, “men! Men everywhere! Men on the ceiling!!!”? Because, surely, if we go along with the standard route of simply asserting that everyone everywhere must always be referred to by the label that supposedly refers to their reproductive organs, we’d be calling them women… so… how is it misogynistic? Was this from someone who thinks that trans is only ever followed by the word “women”?
@Jake Harban, 8
Why would that seem like a good idea? There are already cis people freaking out about the existence of trans people, being baffled by the idea that there might be possibilities beyond “accept the option you were forced into at birth, or the other one,” and acting as if cis is a slur… why would we want to promote the abolition of the concept of gender altogether? At best, that’s just going to be an utterly useless tactic because a pretty significant number of people closely identify with one of the binary options. At worst, people are going to use it as proof that we’re spooky bogeymen who’re out to get them. Maybe the concept will eventually die out as it becomes clear to society that it’s not quite as clear-cut as people have always thought, and I actually would celebrate that, but setting that as a specific goal doesn’t really seem reasonable or tactically sound to me.
You can’t be serious PZ. Lux’s post is not about whether all people with female plumbing should have access to abortion. Lux is condemning the idea that abortion restrictions are part of a war on women’s bodies. I vaguely recall that you think “framing” is bullshit, but like it or not it has real and profound consequences.
I’m stunned that you can raise the issue of trans women’s access to medical care for erectile dysfunction and prostate disease and not have a light go on over your head. That is indeed an area where I can imagine trans women being denied care simply because they are trans. They would NOT be denied that care merely because they have male bodies — because patriarchy doesn’t exist to control men as a class! If we lived under an oppressive matriarchy that controlled men as a class through restrictions on their access to care for their male plumbing, it would be pretty fucked up for a trans woman to come along and deny that such restrictions were part of a war on men, wouldn’t it?
Sounds like an Urologist is need, not an OBGYN.
acting as if cis is a slur
I thought it was. It’s not?
I’ll update my understanding, if that’s the case.
Giliell @ 11:
My point is that actively working towards abolishing gender would further both feminism and LGBT rights (which I think are fairly interconnected). While we probably won’t manage that within our lifetimes, the best way to start is by teaching people not to conflate sex and gender. In my experience, people tend to follow the (linguistic) logic: “IF person HAS baby-making facilities, THEN person IS woman. IFF person IS woman, THEN person HAS (insert list of attributes associated with female gender).” The best way to separate sex and gender is probably to teach people to lop off the second statement— “IFF woman, THEN (attributes of female gender).” It’s easy to recognize the absurdity of that statement if you think about it, and yet all of gender is contained within it. Get rid of that (or at least teach people to start seeing through it), and “woman” becomes solely a reference to sex and gender ceases to exist.
You seem to be following/advocating the logic: “IF person HAS (attributes of female gender) THEN person IS woman.” The problem is that if most people are following the other approach, you end up with confusion and possibly the dismissal of your position as absurd.
Or to put it another, hopefully clearer way, to you the term “woman” means “person who belongs to the female gender.” However, to many people, the term “woman” means “person who belongs to the female sex, which necessarily implies that they belong to the female gender.” So when you say:
It’s clear to us that you mean there is no inherent link between having baby-making facilities and belonging to a group arbitrarily and loosely defined by various personality traits and social expectations any more than there is between wearing skirts and belonging to that group, even though having baby-making facilities and wearing skirts are both traits considered stereotypical of that group.
However, to people who haven’t fully un-conflated sex and gender (or even people who just haven’t learned trans community lingo), your statement would be parsed as: there is no inherent link between having baby-making facilities and having baby-making facilities any more than between wearing skirts and having baby-making facilities. Because that statement is self-evidently absurd, it makes people less likely to understand the distinction between sex and gender.
In the meantime IMO feminism is best served by treating body parts as body parts and not indicators of sex or gender.
Except that sex is defined by body parts.
@Marcus Ranum, 15
Are you making a subtle joke that is currently sailing over my slightly sleep-deprived head?
No. No it is not. No more than heterosexual is a slur.
^ sorry, that should be 25, not 15. Apparently, the numbers section of my brain is non-functional at the moment.
Marcus:
No, of course it isn’t a slur. That doesn’t stop some people from perceiving it as such. You can read about cisgender here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender
RQ & Gen:
Oh, agree, agree, agree. The fact that it is now feminists who are making me feel that woman = less than human is doing my fucking head in. It’s so damn wrong, I don’t have words.
Jennifer Chavez:
Oh for fuck’s sake. Inclusion, ever hear of it? Why are you talking like there’s only one or two trans*persons on the planet, for fuck’s sake? It makes you sound like an idiot, to say the least. Feminism did not fall apart and go away when women started including men in fighting for rights, such as parental leave. Feminism did not fucking fall apart when women figured out that yes, patriarchy hurts men too. Feminism did not fall apart when women figured out intersectionality. This idiocy about “people does not mean women!” is beyond damaging, as well as mind-blowingly stupid. I am a person. I am a person who is absolutely against the erosion of bodily autonomy rights. Did anyone drop dead? No? Goodness, who knew.
Athywren @ 27:
No, Marcus wasn’t joking, but asking a question. Marcus mentioned upthread that he doesn’t know much about trans* issues, so he’s busy reading and learning.
Athywren @ 22:
Sexism rests on the assumption that men (sex) and women (sex) are very different, because two groups that are the same are equal by definition. The concept of gender helps bolster the claim of difference, by creating the categories of men (gender) and women (gender) which are very different and then equivocating between the two. Abolish gender, and the intellectual basis for sexism is completely destroyed.
Transphobia is discrimination based around gender and the failure to conform to the expectations of other people with regard to it. If gender doesn’t exist, there’s no more transphobia.
So why not try to abolish gender? Kill transphobia and injure sexism all at once!
Actually, it seems to me that it should be easier to abolish gender than to radically change it while keeping it intact. Gender is basically just a list of traits and expectations that have been arbitrarily conflated together, with most people believing two conglomerations of conflated traits are legitimate. Teaching people to stop conflating traits and expectations is probably an easier sell than trying to teach them to accept more and more different conglomerations as legitimate.
Count me as another person who had thought “cis” was an insult (based mostly on my reading of some prior usage here at FtB). And until the link in @29, I had never (as far as I can recall) heard of the original term “cisgender“.
Athywren@#27
Are you making a subtle joke that is currently sailing over my slightly sleep-deprived head?
No. No it is not. No more than heterosexual is a slur.
No, I can’t even pull of good jokes, let along subtle ones.
Thank you for subtly RTFM’ing me. I guess I could have done my research instead of just asking here. But, urr. I didn’t?
I’ve heard the term thrown at people, e.g.: “you wouldn’t see through your cis privilege” or whatever, so I guess I’d taken it to be. (I also understand that “privileged” isn’t really a ‘slur’ either – it’s a statement of fact – but my theory of verbal abuse is that invidious comparison is what makes something abusive; so calling someone something that can be a fact, when it’s not true, is usually how slurs work)
Caine@#30:
Yup.
This is a great place to learn these things. I’d never encountered the concept of “privilege” until I encountered it here (then proceeded to ask one of my less-privileged friends, who unloaded the whole lecture on me…) There are a lot of good teachers and explainy-persons here, including Caine, Sally Strange, Tony, Greta Christina, etc. I thank you all.
Blf & Marcus:
Obviously, there’s been a bit too much of tossing cis around, without regard to whether or not people know what you’re talking about. In the future, I’ll use cisgender, rather than cis, and try to link more often. Thanks to you both.
Jennifer’s point either sailed over your head, or you have chosen to ignore it. If the latter, how…convenient for your argument.
If you insist that the meaning of woman can no longer be tied to biological sex (“a woman is an adult female human being,” where “female” means “body which produces egg rather than sperm cells,” or “body which most closely resembles those had by egg-producers,”) then how do you define it?
I’ve been told that a woman is “a person who identifies as a woman,” a circular definition that reduces “woman” to a self-chosen “identity.” It says nothing about why anyone would choose to be a woman. It also erases millions of women who never chose their identity as women, and certainly have no say in the social implications of being one–in other words, the class of people, worldwide, who are oppressed because they were born in bodies that produced ova rather than sperm (or were externally physically indistinguishable from them.)
And what “attributes” are those?
When I was a kid, there was this thing called “femininity.” It consisted of the presumed attributes of a woman: passivity, gentleness, nurturing tendencies (including a deep desire to have and care for babies,) fondness for pastels, intuitiveness, and other qualities. Some of the qualities were negative: inferior intelligence (especially with regards to math and science,) relative lack of leadership qualities, indecisiveness, pettiness, a fascination with trivialities, a tendancy to gossip. They were all normative.
I don’t think it’s enough to divorce the negative qualities from “femininity.” And I don’t think it’s enough to divorce “femininity” from “biologically female.” I think we need to divorce “femininity” (and its contemporary equivalent, woman-as-gender,) from “woman.”
But we do need to acknowledge the class of people who are despised and oppressed because they were born in bodies that produce ova rather than sperm. Furthermore, we need to acknowledge that they are oppressed, in large part, because of the bodies they were born into–however they identify (assuming they have the privilege to “identify” as anything, outside of what their society tells them they are.)
(And as long as saying the above triggers abuse [“TERF,” “bigot,” “cis scum,” “subhuman,”] the movement for equal rights for egg-bearers is going to have a problem.)
Lady M:
One is one’s body, unless one accepts substance dualism.
Which is not to say that gender is not an abstraction of sex, and that gender identity/roles are not themselves an abstraction of gender.
(The whole issue is a category error: specifically, reification)
Huh, this thread took a turn toward the educational. I’ll take advantage by giving my definition of “TERF.” The long version is over here, but in short:
Most people only include points two and three and make the last one mandatory, but gender identity is both a protected right and essential to the definition of “transgender” or “transsexual.” The culture bit is quite important, as there’s a distinctive set of contradictory beliefs and identities that’s worth keeping separate from “transphobe.” I should annotate the original to add that few other definitions require active bigotry (you don’t need to be actively campaigning against gay and lesbian rights to be a homophobe, for instance), and deflate the “it’s just words” argument with “so’s the writing above a bathroom door.”
It’s a frequent trope in TERF-dom to claim that “TERF” is an insult. On one hand, the way I’ve defined it doesn’t explicitly say “TERFs are bad people,” making it a neutral descriptor; on the other, denying the rights of other people is definitionally a bad act, so “TERF” must be an insult in the same sense that “homophobe” is.
Oooo, haven’t argued with Lady Mondegreen yet.
As an identity. We are allowed to self-identify, right? There’s no test I can use to discover your sexual orientation, so if you say you’re gay or straight I have to take you at your word. Likewise, if you say you’d like to be called a woman, it’s rather bigoted of me to deny you that identity.
“Lesbian” says nothing about why you’re attracted to women. Should I deny it as an identity on those grounds?
Those millions could flip their identity by declaring themselves to be men, but chose not to. That’s the beauty of labels. And they most certainly have a say in what it means to be a woman; women are as women do, after all.
Some women do not produce ova. Should we consider them lesser than women who do? Should we stop calling them women? You’re engaging in biological reductionism here, collapsing shades of gray into either black or white and asserting people must fall into either category.
Women’s primary identifying characteristic is bearing eggs? I think we have bigger problems here than language.
Hj Hornbeck:
Really. You link your claim about how it’s frequently used in TERF-dom [sic] to your idiosyncratic definition, then select one horn of the putative dilemma you invent?
Perhaps consider that insults rely on intent, boy, rather than on specific terminology.
(BTW, “rights” are an abstraction, too)
HJ @ 38:
Well, if it is, I’m out, so it’s a good thing I want to primarily identify as a person. My tubes were completely blocked by the time I was 20 (possibly before), and I went through menopause at 36 years old. By those standards, I’m not a woman at all.
Lady Mondegreen @ 35:
I did not insist on any such fucking thing. If that’s how you want to identify, have at it. Apparently, you have oh so conveniently chosen to ignore my points, which is about the refusal on the part of many women to accept the use of people. That refusal is based on bigotry, fear, and exclusion, and no, I don’t fucking like that.
Also, if you’re going to quote me, please take the trouble to include my nym, as well as the nym of other people you quote, because the way you did things, it looks like I said all the things you quoted, which is not the case.
John Morales @39:
TERF was originally more narrowly defined, as someone who calls themselves a radical feminist yet actively works to exclude trans* people, but a number of sources I’ve read have started pushing for a definition similar or identical to mine (references are behind my link above). I don’t have any popularity stats in front of me, so I’d rather go the conservative route and present my definition as more radical and personal than it is.
But note both the original and newer definition have the violation of a basic human right at their core. Should they be considered morally neutral, even if the original intent of the term was to remain neutral? This isn’t an invented dilemma, at best it just wasn’t obvious to TigTog and other users of the term.
So if I invoke “thug” with the best of intentions, I’m off the hook? Accidentally or inadvertent bigotry is still bigotry, we’re just more likely to forgive it.
I’m well aware. For that matter, so too are laws, borders, money, and scientific theories. That doesn’t diminish their importance, use, or consequences.
HJ @ 37:
Yes, I’ve seen that often enough. I really prefer to leave TERF out of discussions, unless one of the people involved identifies that way. I do better with TE, because I’ve had discussions completely derail into splintery messes of “how are you defining radical feminism” and the like. When someone is being trans* exclusionary, it isn’t always intentional, so I try to error on the side of possible ignorance on the side of someone being TE, or someone who hasn’t explored the issue much. And yes, I know, it’s more likely to run into someone who is committed to being TE, and having 5,000 justifications for their position and all, but when it’s someone I don’t know, I like to go with the benefit of the doubt first, and leaving off the RF seems to be helpful in such cases.
I said nothing about denying identities.
Divorce the word “lesbian” from the meaning “woman sexually attracted to other women,” and define it as, “anybody who identifies as a lesbian,” and people would be within their rights to ask you what that means.
If you reply, “a lesbian dresses a certain way, acts a certain, and/or has certain qualities, and I have those or choose to identify with them,” lesbians might have a problem with that.
“Women” are the class of adult human beings who (mostly) bear eggs, yes. And “men” are the class of adult human beings who (mostly) bear sperm.
And those words, “women” and “men,” tell us nothing about the thoughts, personalities, talents, hopes, dreams, etc., of the individual human beings who make them up.
And you’re equivocating.
Hj Hornbeck:
Though you don’t say it, you mean excluded from womanhood, where womanhood is defined exclusively as identifying as a woman, right?
But fine, the original definition applied to radical feminists, but your definition applies to anyone, whether feminist or not. Which means it’s already a misnomer.
To what human right do you refer?
(sigh)
A label is a label; again: a label can be used with intent to insult, or it can be perceived as insulting regardless of intent. It’s its contextual usage (and the perception thereof) that matters.
(Call me a TERF, and though you may imagine I’ll be insulted, I’ll just be amused)
You were talking about whether TERF is an insult, not whether it’s bigotry.
Ahem (my emphasis): “On one hand, the way I’ve defined it doesn’t explicitly say “TERFs are bad people,” making it a neutral descriptor; on the other, denying the rights of other people is definitionally a bad act, so “TERF” must be an insult in the same sense that “homophobe” is.”
You’re unaware that gay people can affectionately call each other “fag” or “girl”, or that African-Americans can (similarly) call each other “nigger”?
Yet again, it’s not the actual terminology, it’s the intent that matters.
No, but it does mean that they are intersubjective rather than objective, and so your appeal to such is worth as much as Christian’s appeal to the concept of sin.
(Do you not deny the Christian’s concept of sin? ;) )
Caine – Your argument is pure emotional manipulation. If we “refuse to accept” your view, you declare, that “refusal is based on bigotry, fear, and exclusion.” No. People have painstakingly explained why they *disagree* with this shift in framing from women’s issues to people’s issues. You’re free to disagree and you can even shut down the argument with emotional blackmail, but you can’t win the argument by tarring people as bigots or phobes.
Hj Hornbeck @41, I responded, but (ironically) my response got swallowed by the “bad word” filters. And I can’t be stuffed rewriting it with filter-evading techniques.
(Perhaps PZ will release it, perhaps not)
[Thanks, PZ]
Lux said “Centering our pro-abortion rhetoric around women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of trans individuals.” That’s more than an argument for trans inclusive language; that’s an argument against framing the fight for abortion rights as (centrally) a women’s issue. There are reasons to oppose that which have nothing to do with bigotry.
@Marcus Ranum, 33
Fair enough… I was just thrown a little off balance by it being presented as a question rather than simply flung out as an unchangeable fact about the universe. I’m kind of used to most people either being mortally offended by its use, or aware of what it means. This is probably covered in the wiki link that Caine shared, but it’s just a latin prefix. It and trans make a matched pair – cis = same side, trans = opposite side, or words to that effect. They’re fairly commonly used in chemistry to indentify the relative positioning of groups within alkene isomers, so it’s something that’s always seemed perfectly cromulent to me… I should probably stop thinking that things I know because of things like that are common knowledge.
@Lady Mondegreen, 43
And those members of humanity who do neither are… what? Are we going to force anybody who produces neither sperm nor eggs into the non-binary category? Because I doubt most of them would be particularly happy with that. And should we eject from the definition those of us who identify as non-binary but do produce sperm or eggs?
Are your definitions based on the realities of individual biology, or more on their biology being
reproductive egg/sperm productive in type?Well that was a badly placed typo. Only “reproductive” should be stricken in that last sentence.
Hurgh. And screwed up the link. Go team.
I really don’t understand the argument. Of course trans people affected by abortion access should be included in the discussion and rhetoric. There is, I think, a small point that simply find-replacing “women” with “people with uteruses” risks obscuring the specifically misogynistic nature of the anti-choice position, but hardly translates to trans-inclusion being not worthwhile, simply that inclusion needs to be done with at least a minimal consideration of nuanc…
…oh.
Nuance, of course, is a slur.
Azkyroth:
Yeah, and (for example) purported TERF Ophelia Benson agrees entirely with this — but she holds that an implicit inclusion suffices whilst not detracting from the point at hand.
The argument is whether the definition from personal identity should supersede the definition of ‘woman’ from biology and/or societal consensus, rather than complement it.
(The perceived difficulty disappears if one considers the term as polysemous; i.e. dependent on context)
It’s not that complicated.
Understanding the polysemy of the term “woman” suffices for nuance; essentialism, from either side, ignores it and therefore doesn’t.
Bah, I’ve got a comment in moderation. If it doesn’t pop out, I’ll post an edited version tomorrow.
John Morales @54:
What’s the biological definition of “woman?” I thought “female” was supposed to be linked to sex and biology, while “woman” was for gender.* Also, there’s a lot missing from your “and/or.” When the societal consensus conflicts with biology, which wins? How do you declare the winner objectively? What do we do when the societal consensus changes?
* I equivocate between them all the time, myself, but that’s because I don’t see a sharp gender-sex divide. If you do, you should be more careful with your terms as it otherwise looks like you agree with me.
I can expand on this tomorrow if anyone wants (this may not be completely coherent and I’m working on explaining this better), but man does not equal male person and woman does not equal female person.
Like it or not there is a part of gender that is influenced by inherited factors and early factors. We don’t have them perfectly explained but what I read is completely consistent with every sex and gender based community that I have been exposed to. Part of gender is innate and clashes with social expectations of sex in individuals such as trans people.
My angle on this situation is that the female version of me tends to have gender dysphoria more often than the average population and I have spent the last six years trying to figure out what I am and it’s buried in neuroscience related to sex and gender. With some subtle differences in the patterns of tics and OCD symptoms, male and female people with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) tend to fit into a masculine behavior stereotype. We can have trouble controlling instincts and behaviors that I would call social dominance oriented. This will become relevant not only because of female people with TS being more masculine, but because I had little problem accepting the idea of one’s reality being wrenched in a totally different direction than the population at large as I hear from trans people. (Also the sensitivity to the social emotional component of language)
Gender is not going anywhere as a concept. It will however be expanded and the characteristics, roles and other things that we have historically associated with sex will be separated out as things that both male and female people can have. And that ultimately is the only meaningful way that those words work in my head anymore, male and female people and a swath of characteristics and roles. I try not to interfere when people want to use man and woman to better understand themselves (my general approach is that the people choosing the label can tell me what it means when they agree). But I have to be honest, I don’t personally see any meaningful universal connection between male person and man or female person and woman, and frankly I get to do that because of my privilege as a male person with TS.
I think that the true tragedy of trans exclusionary people is that they don’t realize that both “sides” exist on a human level. They are trying to deny a segment of human possibility that they don’t personally experience and is politically inconvenient. For them they have an experience of female person and woman being internally and externally consistent. So that is one kind of female person. Someone who’s social and personal experience of the world feels like it does for female people according to historical stereotype, cis. They have an experience of society trying to control their sex with their gender and I very much want to respect that and help smash that means of control. But gender is not purely social. If you just take TS as a part what is influencing of a portion of people with gender dysphoria that is clearly inherited on both male and female sides (epigenetic imprinting is strongly implicated). So it’s possible for at least some people, female people with TS, to inherit something that makes their social and personal experience of the world and themselves inconsistent with respect to female person and woman. Something masculine.
Here is where the trans exclusionary people are right in their own way and what I hope gets hammered through their political myopia. Society is not off the hook. Yes trans people have something biological about them that exists independently of society that has to do with gender, but that necessarily interacts with society. A female person with TS and more masculine instincts gets bombarded with something I will never truly understand, and it causes suffering in the society that we have now. That is two things, a personal and a social factor. I honestly believe that this pain comes from society sending out messages involving individual sexes and pretending certain social roles and characteristics only go with one or the other except that in trans people you have factors (like predispositions for example) that causeserious effects on development and cognition.
Emotions and anatomy are linked in cognition. Emotions and language are linked. Therefore it makes sense to me that language and anatomy influence people’s emotions. So yeah, the language matters to trans people and I have no problem respecting that even if I can be a little clumsy from time to time. The things that reduce that suffering are steeped in social meaning. Social inclusion (symbolic acceptance at multiple levels), hormone treatments (to approximate something they should have been allowed to get in development IMO, testosterone is dominance behavior computationally), surgery, and not in any universal combination. I honestly believe that the real solution is to identify the instincts associated with male and female person by history and stop pretending that they all have to come together. I don’t see how this avoids shattering “man” and “woman” in the long term and simply using male and female person and those characteristics, roles and associated instincts. But what about agender people?
Sexual orientation has analogical characteristics and if you include asexual, pansexual and similar people you start seeing something of a common framework. A historical stereotype with powerful negative and erasing social consequences (male people like female people, female people like male people) that obscures how you can get those two options, and both, a blend or neither at varying intensities.
So yeah, that’s a lot of people to stop ignoring and I’m really tired of hearing the excuses for hiding them in our language and culture. I am not on the trans exclusionary side. Thanks to tourette’s I don’t get to ignore it because I’m attracted to social tension like a fucking moth to a flame, the conflict screams at me right off the screen. I hope this makes sense because I really do see these patterns.
Crap.
Here is that paper.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15487603
Somehow quotation marks got in there.
Hj:
<clickety-click>
This is close enough: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sexual-orientation-gender/female-male-intersex
In jargon, perhaps. In natural language, they’re mostly interchangeable.
They’re the salient bases, and yes, it’s not comprehensive. But you know that.
There is no “winner”. Do you really not get the concept of polysemy?
Winner? What do you imagine I meant by “dependent on context”?
Incorporate the new sense to which the term refers.
(Natural language evolves over time)
Heh. Obviously you don’t agree with me, since you are disputing me.
As to the gender-sex divide, it’s ontological, and the ontological dependence is pretty clear, no?
(BTW, if I agree with you, then you perforce agree with me, since agreement is a biconditional relation. :) )
I’m still curious how the gender abolitionist types propose it stays abolished. Like, I’m not giving up my gender any time I’m alive, and I doubt you’ll be able to quash such an idea forever and ever even if you relied on some very morally wrong means to try to do such.
@13 & @18 Caine
You seem to be making an enormous assumption that I’m somehow unaware that transmen have health needs in common with cis women.
I bring up my husband only because I was surprised his view was different than the one I had at the top of this thread (post number 1, if you need to see). You see this as keeping women’s issues in a sort of political ghetto, but there’s another perspective, which is that there is a clear political campaign where women are the target, and that’s a larger cultural problem that needs to be worked on alongside the specifics of reproductive care access and other “people who are sexually female or considered women by society irrespective of their gender”‘s issues, and “women’s issues” is a lot snappier than the former.
There are obviously other campaigns that are queer- or trans-targeting, like the bathroom scaremongering, but there it would also be derailing to say the fact that the campaign might affect the occasional cisgender person means it isn’t primarily or centrally transphobic. I mean, there’s a reason it’s important to keep detailed hate crime statistics and not just say “___ number of people were killed this year”. And there’s a reason why racists flip their shit in response to *black* lives matter.
@14 Giliel
Honestly, it’s pretty difficult to come up with any analogies that precisely respect the privilege relationships at play here. Ciswomen’s issues and queer issues are very distinctly different, but share the same root causes of misogyny and sexual taboos. Trans issues can be very unique, and at the same time, trans people somewhat uniquely get some of the shit thrown at practically every other group – racism, classism, homophobia, gender essentialism, sex-worker shaming, you name it.
The point is more not wanting to act like someone with privilege-blindness than to imply that transpeople have privilege, which would be a ludicrous thing to suggest in this age.
The phrase ‘reproductive rights’ is far more precise than ‘women’s rights’ when discussing attacks on the right of self-determination and bodily autonomy of people whose bodies typically include a uterus.
TERFs aside, I think some people, when discussing reproductive rights, might use ‘women’ as shorthand for anyone who isn’t a cisgender man, because it seems to me that everyone who falls into that category — cisgender women; trans men and women, gender non-conforming/non-binary — are the ones whose rights and access to appropriate and respectful health care are routinely assailed in both official and unofficial ways. We clearly need a single term that covers everybody who isn’t a cisgender man so that we can more precisely and more inclusively talk about the needs, rights, and experiences of those of us who, as not cisgender men, have bodies that are regarded as ‘non-standard ‘ and somehow not strictly our own private property.
I think I like abortion being framed as a person/people issue. Makes me feel more human, rather than (just) a woman. It’s not men taking over the dialogue, it’s women being raised up a notch to not being a special interest group anymore. We are people, not just women. And trans men and non-binary people are people, too. I don’t see how anyone is excluded by using the word ‘person’, unless you automatically assume that the words ‘person’ and ‘people’ default to men – and if one would like to abolish the gender binary, well, what better way than to insist, loudly and clearly, that women are people too, and should be spoken of as such? Especially on issues that are traditionally defined as women’s issues? Including women (and everyone else) under the label of ‘people’ ensures that society starts thinking of that word as not being default-men, but actually inclusive of all human beings, whatever the issue.
Screw anyone who decides that the word ‘people’ erases women – no, it makes me feel more included as a woman. I am a person, more than I am a woman. (I can’t speak for those groups of people who have traditionally been excluded from pretty much anything, though. So this is my personal feeling.)
“Reproductive” works well, too, with reference to abortion and other reproductive-related issues like contraception.
I agree with most here. I don’t see Lux Pickel’s argument as misogynistic at all, but rather being mindful of those who have been so far almost completely invisible in the conversation. It is perfectly possible to acknowledge that the attack on reproductive rights is part of a larger-scale misogynistic attack on women while also acknowledging that the targets, the casualties, are effectively everyone who can become pregnant – and that includes transgender men and non-binary people.
@Zibble, 61
Just “reproductive rights” seems to work for this case, honestly… and it’s alliterative, which always helps with the snap.
Anyway, obviously that particular issue is one that’s most consciously aimed at cis women, but we do have to be aware that framing it as a problem for cis women and leaving everyone else out, considering them to be implicitly included is likely to lead to problems down the road: Let’s say we eventually reach the point in social development where opposition to women’s bodily autonomy is over and done – women have the clear and unassailed right to decide what to do regarding regulation of their own fertility and maintenance or termination of their own pregnancies, great, but what happens when a trans man wants access to those same rights if we didn’t make it damned clear that they were included? Are we assuming that we’re never going to have a problem with that, or are we just putting off the fight for that fraction of reproductive rights until later?
Personally, I think it’s a huge mistake to assume that this issue won’t arise, because humans kind of suck at this “treating people like people” thing, and while there are basic ethical arguments to be made for including non-cis people who deal with issues related to pregnancy, there’s an efficiency one as well – why should we have to waste time, a few years from now, fighting the same fight for everyone else that we’re currently fighting for cis women when we could make a point of trying to get it all done now? What else could we be getting on with in the future if we don’t keep leaving ourselves in the position where we have to keep fighting the exact same battle for different groups?
rq @ 64:
I agree with every single word you wrote, that’s just how I feel.
Well put Caine. How does being included in a larger group mean being excluded? That just makes no sense.
Damn, still in moderation I see. Please accept this edit as a substitute:
Caine @42:
I’ll bear that in mind. For the moment I’m comfortable invoking “TERF” as appropriate, even if it does cause some people to see red, but as I engage in more arguments that might change.
Lady Mondegreen @43:
You seem to have missed the point, so let’s try again: how do you tell if someone’s a lesbian?
But you didn’t say “the movement for equal rights for egg-bearers and a few non-egg-bearers.” You equivocated between “women” and “egg-bearers” as if the two were equivalent. Why the change in tune?
And if we’re now incorporating people who don’t bear sperm in the category of “men”, are we safe to say trans-men are men too? Even if they do need abortion access? That’s the whole point of using “people” instead of “women,” as there are some men which need access to abortion and gynecological services.
John Morales @44:
You missed the part about “TERF culture.” The definition I quoted here was simplified, as I didn’t want to copy-paste my blog post. Check the link, I go into some length about what that part means. Spoiler: it doesn’t apply to just anyone.
I didn’t.
The original definition refers to the right to personal security, the expanded definition to the right to self-identify one’s gender.
That’s controversial within each community, with some arguing that ironic use emboldens bigots to continue using the slur. Consider the history of “political correctness” or “social justice warrior,” two in-group terms used in a tougue-in-cheek fashion that opponents have turned into slurs. The response in the original communities has been to stop using the term, for exactly that reason.
I’m not sure why that’s relevant to the debate over “TERF,” though. Are you comparing me to GamerGaters and other social conservatives, suggesting I’m taking a term TERFs use and redefining it to my own ends? If so, you should read up on the history of it (again, see my link above).
You think “women” is objective? Or am I misunderstanding you?
They can use it however they want, mere usage doesn’t make it useful nor remove the harm from its use. Personally, I think “sin” is one of the worst inventions of humankind, right next to “bottled water” and “Head-On.”
Zibble, going by your reasoning, you have to kick yourself out of this discussion, being a man.
Rietpluim @ 69:
Oh, it makes sense, sort of, anyway. If we’re people, it will be about the men, because everything is about the men! I grok that, too. I’ve been around and active in feminism for too many decades, and I think that narrative was necessary for a long time. What I’m seeing (and feeling) now is a sort of self-oppression. Women have so thoroughly accepted the social divide, it’s now this towering, tilting wall, with women continuing to pile the bricks on. As Gen @ 21 pointed out, anything labeled ‘women’s’ is pretty much dismissed, like women’s lit, rather than literature. While it was good to highlight woman / women’s for that long time, I think it’s damaging now, the cracks are showing, and widening.
I know I’m not explaining it well, so I’ll just point to rq @ 64, who said it all.
This strikes me as a rather flimsy and reductive definition.
Loopyj @ 63:
Reproductive rights works for me, and I’ll use it from now on. Thank you.
From the link:
No, that just confuses the issue even more. My driver’s license only allows M or F. My country’s census is the same, plus it doesn’t include any clarifying remarks on what “sex” means. I’m expected to inherently know which of those two sexes I belong to, without any ambiguity, yet here’s Planned Parenthood talking about a three sex model?! Either intersex is so rare that a country of thirty-five million can ignore it entirely, or Planned Parenthood is inflating trivial differences into a third sex, or societal consensus is a bullshit marker of sex.
On top of that, can we sort everyone into three categories? I’m going from memory, but these examples either did happen or are all plausible. Which of “male,” “female,” and “intersex” do they belong to?
I could go on. Suffice to say, dividing people into two sexes cleanly is impossible, and slapping “intersex” on someone says little about how they live, how their body is shaped, or who they sleep with.
Usage follows understanding. In other words, most people think they’re interchangeable and can see no clean sex/gender divide.
I just wish all the people who say there’s a clean divide could just tell me that ontology. I’d love to hear it!
Holms @72:
Can you offer me a better alternative? I don’t see one.
Athywren @67
Based on previous experience, I’d say the latter.
Mainstream feminism has shown itself to have plenty of advocates who are happy to cut people out of the circles of their concerns for various reasons. African-American women, sex workers, trans people of all genders, disabled people, religious (esp. non-Christian) women, immigrant women, etc. To the extent that their concerns don’t coincide with the concerns of particular high-profile (privileged cis white educated Western) feminists, their concerns are labelled “not feminism” at best and “anti-woman” or “patriarchal” at worst. Unless we insist on inclusion now, we can pretty much count on being excluded when the “victories” come.
(Cf.: the way mainstream supposedly LGBTQ+ organizations such as HRC and Empire State Pride have happily thrown trans people under the bus.)
Um, I seem to have brought us around to the post that started this whole discussion.
I find it incredibly difficult to imagine a scenario in which abortion is widely available, but not for transmen.
The issue trans people *do* have is often getting adequate medical care *in general*. It’s not so much an issue of reproductive rights as general ignorance of and outright bigotry towards trans people, which is a separate issue.
See, I think what you’re saying implies the opposite of your thesis – trans people face very specific difficulties which aren’t being addressed through amalgamation. I think it’s good to talk about these trans issues, and it’s good to talk about then *during* the abortion debate, but less and less I’m seeing any wisdom in trying to redefine the core of what reproductive rights is actually about.
@71 Caine:
At what point did I ever say this was about kicking people out of any discussion? I didn’t even say we shouldn’t talk about trans issues during this discussion. You’re being extremely disingenuous.
Zibble @ 78:
No, I’m not. Perhaps I wasn’t clear, though. I didn’t mean discussion as in this thread, I meant the wider one regarding reproductive rights. If you’re going to go along with “yep, it’s a woman’s issue”, there’s no place for you, as a man, in the discussion or the fight.
Caine @71 Kind of like heads I win tails you loose, isn’t it? If it’s about people, it’s not really about women, and if it’s about women, it’s not really about people. I still feel the best choice is “people” though, provided with “people” we mean people.
Rietpluim @ 80:
Yep, that’s it exactly.
And to add to mine @ 81, we’re never going to make that step from woman to person if we don’t make the decision to change the effing narrative. We have the power to do that, which makes me really wonder at those people who are digging themselves up to the neck, resisting any change at all.
I don’t think it ever occurs to some that the way they are defending being exclusionary and maintaining the status quo has a whole lot in common with privileged white men, who do the same thing.
Yes, and I don’t think anybody denies this.
I think about everybody here can agree that:
-subjugation of women is based on our supposed reproductive capacities
-control of this reproductive capacities is fought over
-those leading the attack do not recognise trans men as men, if they feature on their radar at all
This does not mean that this war on reproductive rights affects only fertile cis women nor does it mean that we have to accept this framing.
Accepting that fertile people with uteri who are not women are not the primary target of this fight does not mean we cannot recognise that those people are also affected and probably hit even harder.
Again, we do not have to accept the opposition’s framing of the terms. We can choose to be inclusive in our fight.
+++
Another point is this supposed dichotomy of sex and gender where one is seen as flimsy and the other one as real. And I know, we have been through this before: Both are socially constructed. Both have changed over time. As HJ has demonstrated above, none is clear cut. Just because “Baby born with labia and a vagina*” has been the definition of “female” for a very long time doesn’t make it true as if it were wisdom handed down by the gods.
*that’s the thing, isn’t it? People don’t make an ultrasound to confirm “uterus and ovaries”. they much less carry out a genetic test to look for “XX”. And once the genitals are in a diaper, the simple presence or absence of certain colour is enough…
+++
zibble
Right now it’s trans people raising those issues because they are facing difficulties greater than cis women. I’m glad if your spouse hasn’t encountered difficulties in that respect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.
I won’t join the discussion so far,* which is one part arcane and one part productive. The post made me think of the sections in Ian Birchall’s (2005) Sartre Against Stalinism about postwar leftist/anti-Stalinist publications in France.
Several of these publications were eclectic. This didn’t mean that the authors of articles took no position, but that they took a range of leftist positions. The important point was that writers made arguments – while they could be personal, they couldn’t be reduced to personal attacks or smears.
A policy of eclecticism and openness is perfectly consistent with having an editorial line, especially given that today anyone can post online and even a blog group or platform that rejects a view can link to it.
I think three points follow: First, it’s not wrong to set out a basic set of values that animate the network as the editorial line. Second, given an editorial line, there should be a wide tolerance of related views (including comments) that should be published and debated. Third, within this general sphere, personal attacks should be minimized and substantive arguments encouraged.
*Except for:
*shakes head* No.
*Nods head* Yes.
The end to gender oppression – how simple it was all along!
@86
What are you on about?
Presumably Hj isn’t saying that they would no longer face oppression – that’s demonstrably false, seeing as Dfab trans people often continue to face misogyny while (and sometimes even after) transitioning.
What they were contending with was the part that said they “never chose to be a woman”, as if they aren’t making that choice each and every time they self-identify as a woman.
QFMFT
And no thanks, I won’t have that identity reduced to “walking baby making machine”. It’s kind of funny to see feminists more invested in the definition of “woman = baby making facilities” than conservative christians…
BTW, one of the most common anti-trans arguments is that folks “didn’t grow up male/female*” But suddenly all there is to being a man or a woman is having a certain set of genitals (and damned be those who have both or neither). Apparently you can have your cake and eat it.
*I guess that with increasingly younger ages of transistioning this will boil down to “you didn’t wear pink onesies when you were still shitting yourself” one day.
Sorry, but that is just a non-sequitur; there is nothing in ‘reproductive freedom is a women’s issue’ that means men can’t get involved. In the general case, ‘X issue is about Y demographic’ has never meant that there is only ever one demographic that can speak on an issue.
Personally, I don’t really think people can choose their own gender identity any more than they can choose their sexual orientation. Discover and come to terms with it (sometimes after a great deal of personal introspection and exploration), yes. Announce and affirm it, yes. But actively choose it? Not so much. That’s a big part of the reason why reparation therapy for transgender people, like that performed at Kenneth Zucker’s clinic (now shut down), is so harmful – it’s really no different from reparation therapy for gay people.
falcon
I think that’s the point. If “woman” were merely a label pushed on them by others, they could simply reject it. Since they don’t, and probably can’t, “woman” must be more than something somebody else declared them to be.
@91
That’s almost exactly the opposite of how I read Hj’s post.
If we’re operating under the “woman = person who identifies as a woman” definition, everyone who has ever called themselves a woman is making the active choice to identify themselves as one and not as some other gender.
That’s the exact state closeted trans people exist in, for example – openly identifying as one gender while their actual gender is something different.
Now, given that we don’t have telepathy, we have to go with how someone claims to identify, since we can’t tell what their actual gender identity is in their head.
If someone tells you they identify as a man, you go along with it, even if in their head they might actually identify as a man in their head.
Therefore, literally anyone is capable of changing how they identify really, really easily. If you want to stop being identified as a woman, under that definition, you only need to declare it.
Now, I’m not saying this will somehow make people stop treating you as a woman, of course, because not everyone accepts that definition. As such, “Everyone actively chooses to identify themselves as some gender” and “Gender-based oppression exists” do not necessarily conflict.
@92 should read
“even if in their head they might actually identify as a woman in their head.”
Vivec
I think there’s several things going on here at the same time and I’m going to try to untangle them. PLease tell me if I’m not making sense ’cause I also have a royal headache…
First let me state a premise: For the overwhelming majority of people “gender identity” is not a choice, but “gender presentation” is.
The whole conversation started with sbdy claiming that self identification isn’t a good definition of “woman” because there are allegedly millions of women who never chose to identify as women but who were only externally classified as women.
Those people could simply reject the label. You are correct that this is easy and simple and does NOT actually tell us anything about their “true” gender identity.
Fact is they don’t, and while there are certainly closeted trans men and non-binary folks among them who remain closeted for very specific reasons, the overwhelming majority of those people keep the label because they think that for some reason or other it fits them. In short, they will say “I am a woman” and tick the box with an “f”. They do not reject the label. This is an active choice. Therefore, those women who allegedly only ever had that label pushed on them by the outside do actually claim that label for themselves.
@Giliell
Alright, we’re absolutely in agreement then. Sorry if I misread you.
Apologies for leaving everyone hanging, but seriously – has no-one read Judith Butler?!**
Butler’s insight was to reframe the debate over what “woman” means in terms of behavior and to emphasize fluidity, as both play a much larger role than any fixed biology. This means that sexism is primarily behavioral and fluid too; a dramatic example is computer science, which at one point was considered women’s work and devalued as such. If we were to change the culture around computer science and remove the behaviors which penalize women relative to men, then the rank sexism would evaporate.
Is having a million people change what “woman” means via changing their behavior “easy?” Hell no. But is it possible? Yes, and in fact it’s inevitable if any significant progress is to be made.
My proposal wasn’t a radical notion, it’s actually elementary feminism. I was taught it in my introductory courses. It’s telling that Salty Current had to resort to quote-mining to make it seem like I was off in la-la land.
** Trick question: no-one actually reads Judith Butler, they just read the summaries of those who’ve built up an immunity to her dense post-structualist prose.
Whoops, should have put “simple” in scare-quotes instead of “easy.” My bad!
HJ
No, nobody actually reads Butler, not even the summaries. I’m not even trying to argue performativity, social construction, the origin of the kin system, etc. in these discussions. And yes, I have actually read Butler, several of her books (and it’s no light “before bed” reading).
And hell yes. It’s being done constantly, all over the place, has been forever. That’s the thing about gender and performativity. Our great-great-grandparents would hardly recognise today’s men and women as such.
Every woman who ever put on trousers did so. Every woman who proudly went out of the home to work. Every woman who ever took contraception.
Genital feature surprisingly little in this constant defining and redefining…
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @98:
Fair point. It’s less about changing what “woman” means, and more about changing it to something that isn’t sexist. I’m reminded of “difference feminism,” which proposed at minimum that men and women were “separate but equal” and occasionally that women were “separate and superior.” Squint a little and that looks like progress over “separate and inferior,” but in reality it’s trying to fix some sexism by invoking sexism.
Other examples, for your lazy Sunday browsing: New Feminism, confusing empowerment and equality, “equity” vs. “gender” feminism, “Lean In,” choice feminism…
@ Hj Hornbeck:
Look, I’m really trying to get a grip on biological sex, sexual identity, gender identity, and similar qualities that define how a person experiences themselves and their relations to larger societies. But I simply fail to see how one divorces “woman” from “sexism”, and for me that’s illustrative of how the word “woman” is becoming either massively overburdened as a term, or carrying multiple and contradictory definitions.
I mean, that comment, to me reads awfully like “I don’t see sex”. I’m sure that’s not what you mean, but here’s why it reads that way to me.
Here’s you at #56:
You then say that you don’t see a sharp gender-sex divide (same comment).
Which leaves me, as someone trying to get a grip on all this, with a massive response of ‘uh?’. We redefine “woman”, and therefore sexism disappears? I’m genuinely confused. I mean really, hands up to the air confused. You invoke Butler… but if gender and therefore sexism are social performance (by groups), where does biology fit in? How does redefining “woman” eliminate, what, reproductivism? uterism? breast-feeding-ism? not-covering-your-hair-you-slut-ism?
Obviously these are things “performed” via Butler’s analysis. Redefining “woman” doesn’t make that go away.
Literally shaking my head and not understanding your point. Would appreciate further commentary.
@Jennifer Chavez:
Oh, and here I thought we were more concerned about winning reproductive rights than we were with “winning the argument.” They’re not synonymous. No one here is a policymaker. (Probably). If we can agree on what we want to communicate with our policymakers, well, then we have an argument to “win” in the sense that it will translate to rights. But I’ve got enough tread marks from cis-sexists throwing me under the bus that I’m not entirely too sympathetic to the argument that women are, somehow, not people, because eggs = woman. Or something. I can’t quite follow the mental gymnastics required to remain a biological reductionist in the presence of the body of research that explores gender variance.
Oh, I guess it requires commenting on gender variance without reading the research on gender variance, a la Young Earth Creationists offering input to Geologists. That’s how highly I think of this asinine cis-sexist horseshit.
I’m with Hj and Gilliel and Caine and Vivec probably a few I missed: The patriarchy reduced women to their reproductive role, how exactly are you and Mondegreen liberating women by buying into that definition?
For the record: Framing my argument in how “reproductive rights” branding benefits cis women still makes me sick to my stomach.
Start of conversation: Yo, trans people need access to abortion.
End of conversation: But what about teh cis womenz!!!
Seriously, this is so fucked up. I can’t believe every conversation about trans health on this blog spirals down into how it affects cis women. Can we just take a moment to acknowledge how fucked that is? Sorry I contributed to it.
We can recognize the poison behind All Lives Matter. We can recognize the poison around Blue Lives Matter. But apparently we’re still working on this giant fucking blind spot, blissfully unaware of the irony when Cis Lives Matter comes up.
Going to go throw up now.
Lesbian Catnip:
Yes.
For what it’s worth, so am I.
Lesbian Catnip @102:
At least some of the people reading are doing so with an open mind. Always remember the silent majority.
PatrickG @ 100:
As you should be, because that’s not the program. Quoth myself @ 74:
Our society is dead-certain it knows what sex is, and dead wrong about it. This has consequences, as we act on stereotypes that are contrary to reality. One of many examples:
Benard, Stephen, and Shelley J. Correll. “Normative Discrimination and the Motherhood Penalty.” Gender & Society 24, no. 5 (2010): 616–46.
Now if you’ve grown up in a sexist society, your first response to “gender stereotypes discriminate” is “let’s remove gender.” Because that stereotype’s been hammered into your head so hard you KNOW on some level it’s true, so by elimination the problem must be with gender.
What you might not know is that “sex” has changed radically over the years. What the ancients thought of it is tough to suss out, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, but we seem to have started off with a “one-sex” model. Women were men with their penises inverted and vice-versa, plus everyone produced sperm (’twas stored in your brain), and in certain circumstances the critical bits of anatomy could flip.
Scholars like Plato proposed a three-sex model, with “hermaphrodites” that were a jumble of male and female characteristics, which diffused into the educated class. Unfortunately, they rarely talked to the proletariat and frequently disagreed with one another, so a confusing jumble of folk biology was dominant. Sometimes all of us were “one” with minimal difference, other times women were half-baked men (literally in some instances, as Aristotle thought heat was critical to development).
That changed in the 1800’s with the scientific revolution… sorta. Softening societal attitudes and a rejection of religion led to the proposal two distinct sexes. It wasn’t long before things split, though; some argued for a biological difference but mental similarity, others just underscored difference and tacked on inferiority. Intersex people challenged the two-sex model, so they were declared broken by its proponents. There was also the annoying problem that no-one could find a true binary split between the sexes, which touched off a race to find it.
Around 1900, though, chromosomes were discovered. In the 1930’s, testosterone and estrogen were finally isolated and mass produced. The binary had been found, and it was by Objective and Indifferent science! Huzzah! Meanwhile, social scientists were squabbling over psychological differences, with some finding a nice binary in certain abilities and others unable to replicate those or with good alternate explanations in hand. To name one example, “spatial ability” used to encompass everything from route finding to memorization, but researchers found wildly contradictory subdivisions that pointed every which way. The only stability seemed to be mental rotation, which had a strong and clear advantage for men. So “spatial ability” was gently redefined as “mental rotation.” :P
In sum: every time we tried to redefine “woman,” sexism found a way to creep back in.
The past few decades, genetics has been shooting large holes in that clean biological binary, and meta-analyses have been swatting down large gender differences in the psychological domain. The scientific consensus is converging on “sex” as being complicated and fuzzy in the biological domain, with overhyped differences in the mental domain.
It’s not the same as “sex doesn’t exist,” but nor is it endorsing any rock-solid definition of “woman.” It instead argues for a flexible, non-normative approach. Someone says they’re a woman? Cool, be yourself. I don’t care. But if someone else says this person isn’t, and starts discriminating against that first person because they don’t fit into their mental model? I do care about that, and I’m going to swat it down like any other pseudoscience or magical belief.
Hopefully that clarifies things, for “things” other than sex and gender.
That’s as may be, in that it’s equally tough to suss out now and forevermore given the fluidity of the idea and how it’s reinforced and reproduced, but that’s not for lack of trying. Classicists count among their numbers many, many scholars in cultural history, sexuality, gender, masculinity, &c, and have done in the US and UK since the late 1970s, commencing in the early 90s to become a fairly prominent field of inquiry. No Classics department I know of lacks their resident expert(s). Unless you’re talking about “ancients” outside of the Mediterranean I think you’re mischaracterizing things somewhat in suggesting there was no binary, no pervasive misogyny, no objectification based on a fairly concrete notion of what constituted women and made them an Other, no civic disenfranchisement of women.
Apologies, I was quoting Hj Hornbeck in 104.
snuffcurry
No, I think you’re getting HJ wrong. The notion what sex is, how many there are and what qualifies as a distinguishing factor has changed historically as much as the notion of gender norms, femininity and masculinity.
This does not erase the power difference or that the historical view is one of a binary, with compulsory heterosexuality thrown into the mix AND subjugation of women exactly because of their perceived reproductive capabilities.
But people often argue that while there is no real gender binary, the sexual binary is totes just real* with a few “oddities”.
Getting back to Butler, not only did she effectively demonstrate this social character of the construction of sex, but also proposes that actually there is no real difference between sex and gender (though it is a handy distinction in certain contexts).
*Interestingly they’ll throw some newer biological definition at you like “has XX / has XY” or “produces sperm/ova” at you but still identify babies depending on whether they are wearing pink or blue.
+++
Lesbian Catnip
Intersectionality. Many cis white feminists simply don’t get it.
They cannot for their life understand that there may be other factors that are more important than sex/gender. They are forever hurt when a black woman doesn’t see her as a “sister” but just another white person, when trans people need to discuss trans things and do not appreciate their cis feminist input…
@Hj Hornbeck
You might be interested in knowing that mental rotation trends between male and female people are flipped in Tourette’s Syndrome with female people with TS showing an enhancement relative to female controls (same paper I cited above).
Unfortunately that is a paper I do not own (I wish I had the means to download papers like I did when I worked at a university), but I do own this one and it states the relevant information in a linguistic context.
Incidentally while I am getting pretty good at talking about the problems in how society uses and defines the words man and woman, I am not so good at the same when it comes to male and female. Do you have any sources that I can look at? Including the works by Butler that you refer to (same for you Giliell and anyone else since there are more than one person referencing them).
snuffcurry @105:
Things get even fuzzier outside of our Greek roots; Hindu scriptures place women in prominent roles, allowing them to challenge male thinkers, whereas ancient Japan bounced everywhere between venerating women and placing them in leadership roles to confining them to domestic tasks. Even in ancient Greece, you’ll find divergences; Aristotle wasn’t alone in considering women inferior, yet Euripides’s Medea can read like a lament:
Did the elites discriminate against women? Yes, with rare exceptions. We don’t really know about the poor and uneducated, though, and when you’re one bad harvest away from death you can’t afford to think of women as weak and homebound. Hence why I didn’t emphasize the misogyny.
But again, Plato thought there were three sexes. Roman historians duly note the existence of “hermaphrodites,” typically followed by the removal of that existence. The one-sex model doesn’t imply “woman” or “man” carried no semantic weight, it argues that people thought that one could be changed into the other.
Eckert, Christina Annalena. “The Historicisation of the hermaphroditic/Intersexed Body: From Medicalisation to de-Medicalisation.” University of Essex, 2003.
Under the two-sex model, this tale is ludicrous; how could Marie have picked up a Y chromosome / changed her hormone levels / swapped her genome? It only makes sense if you believe humans have a single sex, which varies in development. The extent that each model held sway in ancient times is up for debate, but since the one-sex model is a better fit for folk biology I figure it came first.
Brony @108:
Thanks for reminding me of that! I’d intended to circle back to it, since I do have access, but got distracted.
I’ve a few beefs with that paper. For one, the sample size is low. They had 22 males with tic disorders (TD) only, 11 with OCD, 22 with both, and 36 male controls; the matching female numbers are 11, 8, 15, and 31. Even those numbers were split into two categories, based on age, so there’s huge potential for p-hacking and succumbing to the law of medium numbers.
Second, their effect sizes are a bit odd.
Assuming that “males with tic disorder” includes those with OCD and ignores age, I calculate an effect size of d = -0.8 (95% CI -1.3 to -0.4) for the males and 0.30 (-0.2 to 0.79) for the female group. The former is pretty robust, but a p-distribution calculator suggests that even if the latter were true there was a mere 21% chance of getting a statistically significant result.
Pitting the controls against one another, I get d = 1.3 (0.8 to 1.7), which is oddly high; Voyer’s 1995 meta-analysis found 0.56 across 35 studies.[1] As I said, there’s something iffy with that study.
Try #ICanHazPDF on Twitter. If you’re really desperate, try emailing the original authors or grabbing the papers while on campus.
A lot of my views on the history of sex come from this book:
Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, 1992.
But I’ve heard other scholars claim Laqueur over-emphasizes the case for the one-sex model, so approach it with some salt.
[1] Voyer, Daniel, Susan Voyer, and M. Philip Bryden. “Magnitude of sex differences in spatial abilities: a meta-analysis and consideration of critical variables.” Psychological bulletin 117.2 (1995): 250.
@77 zibble
Because “OBGYNs are for women” and “men don’t belong here,” a lot of trans men go without basic reproductive care either because they aren’t willing to deal with the hassle of rude people who clearly don’t want them there, or they’re simply denied outright.
Can’t count the number of times I’ve been told that I’m encroaching on women’s spaces and have no dog in this fight, despite the fact that I have a working uterus that requires maintenance same as anyone else’s.
Also, abortion is NOT widely available. It’s a scarce resource. Trying to cut off* a vulnerable group of people from it is immoral.
*Because intent isn’t fucking magic. You can proclaim 10.000 times that you want healthcare for trans people as well. If your actual politics exclude them that’s what you’re doing.
Giliell @ 112:
No, it certainly isn’t. Here in the U.S., many states have reduced clinics to one per state, and many of those states have instituted restrictions to the point that for many women, it’s not possible to meet all the restrictions, do all the traveling, take time off work, and all the rest, in a manner timely enough to make the clinic before cut off, which has been radically shortened in many states.
Oh for fuck’s sake, my apologies for the above being so woman centered. In that scenario, however, which is the reality for too many people, do you imagine, Zibble, that there’s any ease or place for trans persons?
@Hj Hornbeck
Thank you for taking the time to point out the strength of the data to me. I have been mentally prepared for any of the papers that I cite to be weaker than I thought and accommodating this is not a problem. It’s the broad behavior characteristics that I find more useful and I will take your suggestions and try to get my own copy soon.
Truthfully it’s only recently that studies into TS have been separating groups properly (ADHD, OCD, sex and other things are all relevant factors) and historically the field has been terrible at putting a good effort into studying female people with TS as well as male people with TS as is common in many fields.
Did the paper compare male people with tic disorders with female people with tic disorders? I realize that it’s not a well studied hypothesis, but I support the view that many of these “neurodevelopmental disorders” are in fact perfectly normal humanity* in terms of individual differences. I believe the reason we see them as problems is that society tends to know them by the examples that medical science interacts with in combination with a society that wants to pretend we are all one thing in a society that emphasizes competition, not unlike the situation with trans people. Many conditions such as TS, ADHD and autism are associated with strengths and advantages and society is not very good at dealing with people in terms of differences and innate aptitudes at that level without treating people like objects and acting like people have to do X or Y in life, not unlike what it does with men and women.
Thank you for your help.
Ignore the “*”, I changed my mind and forgot to delete that.
I also meant to say “male and female people” and not “men and women” at the end.
@ HJ Hornbeck:
Thanks for the response. Likely won’t have a chance to respond (12 hour days in anticipation of vacation where I will burn to the ground any sources of internet*, but I did want to (belatedly) say I appreciate it.
* Warning: danger of falling satellites starting 1/12. I. Will. Not. Work. On. Vacation.
PatrickG @118:
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll rummage around in the spare closet for my bicycle helmet.
Brony @116:
Quite a bit, as I recall. Some choice quotes:
But again, it’s a small study with a questionable methodology. Fine for a pilot project, but it probably shouldn’t have been published without at least effects sizes calculated (and those goddamn p-values piss me off). You’d probably be more interested in something like this. Note the use of odds ratios and confidence intervals, they’re a flag for quality (though the gold standard is still reading through the methodology section).